Welcome back to the Meet Our Team Q&A series. My name is Daniela Williams, Project Manager at ISE, and I’ll be asking ISE team members questions to help give insight into what makes us tick.

Each summer ISE hosts an internship program that has attracted highly qualified college students from around the state. This summer Ben Mitchinson, Nick Dallege, and Jordan Pohlman joined the ISE team - well, Jordan for her second summer. Today I chatted with the group to learn a bit more about each of them.  

I recently received my AWS DeepLens device.  I’m by no means a machine learning expert.  However, Andy Jassy’s announcement of the device at 2017’s AWS re:Invent implied that the DeepLens would put Machine Learning and Computer Vision in the hands of non-experts and make it easy.  So, let’s try out one of AWS’s pre-trained samples to see just how easy this device is to use.

As has been mentioned in past blog posts, there are security concerns with IoT systems.  When discussing distributed ledger technology (DLT) we investigated how a blockchain approach could address the security concerns, but introduces system demands in terms of memory and computing power that do not appear practical for many of the simple IoT devices on the market today. Enter the permissioned blockchain; a network where only specific nodes are required to maintain the transaction ledger and determine which transactions are allowed.  This addresses the problem with strict centralized control discussed in the first blog post in this series and the issue of memory demands discussed with a completely decentralized model in the second blog post.